20 Blissful Minutes of Cozy Grove a Day, Might Just Keep your Mind at Bay
Spry Fox brings an Animal Crossing adjacent experience, that’s refreshing and filled with emotional storytelling
My login streak in Animal Crossing New Horizons began to dwindle months ago when I finally got my island to five stars and almost collected everything there is to obtain in terms of filling up my museum. The only reason I check-in to play every now and then currently, is to see which new items are in the shop or to enjoy one of the many events and holidays. The Animal Crossing itch is no longer being scratched, and so I perused through Steam last week to see if there’s any upcoming life-sim games that aren’t hyper-realistic, something that can let me relax and chill out just like Animal Crossing used to every day.
That’s when I made my way to Cozy Grove.
Developed by Spry Fox, Cozy Grove aims to be a relaxing, story rich game about camping on an island that’s haunted by friendly but troubled ghosts. You play as a Spirit Scout, each day is spent with you adventuring out and exploring the hand-drawn island, uncovering secrets, collecting items, and helping comfort the spirits you find along the way. Spirits have unique and deep stories for you to unravel, helping them not only brings color to the island, but conversing with them each day breeds new dialogue and backstory interactions with them, allowing you to learn more about their character and connect with them on an emotional level. Some of these in-depth storylines even offer unique moments inspired by real stories of people the development team have relationships with. When you’re not befriending the local ghosts, you can be exploring other regions of the ever-changing island, searching for different collectables like shells or casting your line at the shore for fish. Akin to Animal Crossing, there’s a museum that serves as a place for everything you’ve decided to donate instead of sell, and apparently per an article on VICE, this museum exists within the mind of a ghost penguin. Which only goes to show how calming and joyous Cozy Grove’s characters and spirits are designed to be, portraying that exact chill vibes experience I long for again.
What makes Cozy Grove so refreshing is it’s staggered storytelling. Just like Animal Crossing, Cozy Grove takes place in real time, so unless you change the time on your device, you’re limited to how much of the story you can advance in a single day. The game will let you know when you’ve done all there is to do for the day in terms of progressing the story. These short bouts of roughly 20–30 minutes might re-energize you for the rest of your day outside of the game, or make you feel happy and positive upon logging off, as you just learned a little bit more about a ghost’s backstory or the island of Cozy Grove. However, if you want to keep playing after you’ve progressed the story as much as you can in a given day, you can. There’s side-quests you can find, items to collect and sell, clothes to buy, characters to talk to, spirit animals to locate, crafting, and your camp to customize.
Your camp starts out as a small campfire and is upgraded through spirit logs that you obtain via helping ghosts of the island. These logs evolve your campfire to a tent and eventually larger homes. You can decorate your camp with items you find in your travels and items that you craft from materials found around the island like branches, stones, etc. Decorations like gardens, light fixtures, arches, tables, chairs, plants, wooden structures, brick structures, there’s tons of customization options available to collect and personalize your cozy area with.
Being able to wake up in the morning, make some matcha tea, and start my day off with another game similar to the experience of Animal Crossing, but instead enriched with meaningful storytelling and a beautiful visual art style, are moments I long for. I’ve never been bothered by the real-time mechanic in Animal Crossing. Playing every single day for small amounts of time, witnessing the new and surprising appearances of different characters or different events, make each day fun and uniquely exciting. I’ve always loved the journey of Animal Crossing and how, after a full year of playing, I can remember specific moments that I’ll have memories of forever. Having that exact same journey-like experience again, over months of time, now with emotionally driven characters and storylines that develop along that time period, is going to be that much more engaging and that much more memorable.
Cozy Grove is going to be an absolute delight.
Cozy Grove releases on April 8th on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Apple Arcade. The Steam page is linked down below.
Cozy Grove Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1458100/Cozy_Grove/
Sources
VICE: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvx9vw/cozy-grove-is-ok-telling-players-to-log-off-its-delightful
IGN: https://www.ign.com/articles/cozy-grove-is-animal-crossing-with-more-story-less-capitalism
